Commenting on Global Politics, items of concern to Marcus Aurelius, and everything in between!

Monday, March 21, 2005

South Park.

Much has been made about "South Park Republicanism" in other blogs. I just want to give my take on South Park.

I caught last week's episode on Friday night (second half) and found it good. Now, not every South Park has a conservative message, some are libertarian, some episodes are nothing but 100% pure unadulterated potty humor. If you can get over the potty humor South Park often times does deal with some fairly serious themes.

Last week's episode had South Park being invaded by hippies ala Woodstock. The city fathers wanted to let them in and Cartmann was locking up as many as he could in his basement. Cartmann was arrested and eventually it was discovered a mass of hippies hundreds of acres in size was not what South Parks wanted.

Stan, Kyle, and Kenny were in the midst all gung-ho about working with the hippies to bring on social justice and yadda-yadda-yadda. Kyle quickly learned it was nothing but talk and what the hippies really wanted to do was to do drugs, listen to music and carry on as they wanted. He went up on stage and pointed this out but the hippie proposed solution was to rock harder!

In my younger days I was a Dead-head went to a bunch of shows at Alpine Valley but I too came to see through the "peace and love, social justice" mask. They would gripe about yuppies and how they all dressed alike. I do not believe none of them ever thought they too were wearing a uniform. A college friend of mine would gripe how his car would often get searched when pulled over for a traffic offense. I pointed out to him his tye-dyed long-hair appearance, patchouli smelling vehicle was in itself a uniform, the uniform of a drug user/dealer.

I once went to a protest in Madison. People marched down State Street and sat down on the capital lawn. Once on the lawn the people were partaking in their item of protest and strumming guitars and the like (see the episode of South Park that captures the scene nicely). One woman tried to get the crowd to chant "legalize it! Now" chant going but no luck.

Eventually the police arrested a "partaker" on the edge of the crowd and you can be sure the crowd got a uniform chant going real quick. They were chanting out the expanded version of "BS".

All I could do was to roll my eyes and realize this movement was going nowhere.